Summer 2000, Volume 18.0

Essay

David Hutto

The Southern Quandary of Being OK but Southern

David Hutto was born and raised in the south, and he
currently teaches at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. He has
graduate degrees in both English and Russian, with a Ph.D. in rhetoric from
Georgia State University. His latest publication (in addition to Weber
Studies) is a forthcoming essay on visiting Moscow, in Humanities in the
South.

When I was a boy near Gainesville, Georgia, we
used to go to our Baptist church just down the road, a church my
grandparents helped to found during some presumably bitter schism from
another small Baptist church down the road in the other direction. My
grandparents were farmers, and during the summer when the nights were long
and warm, occasionally everyone who was present at church on Sunday night
(definitely a more serious theological crowd than on Sunday morning) was
invited out to my grandparents' house to eat watermelon. I still remember
being out in the front yard, under the large pecan tree, eating pieces of
watermelon on Sunday evenings. Does eating watermelon under that tree make
me southern?

At about the same age, when I would talk to other boys during recess at
the all-white school I attended, among the jokes that got told were
regular instances of racist jokes directed at African Americans. Although I didn't particularly like those jokes, because of the
way I was raised, I don't think I said much about it, either. And when my
friends or classmates would make scurrilous remarks using language such as
"coons" or "niggers," I think I was more likely to
ignore the remark than condemn the racism. Does experiencing those
attitudes in school, and my reaction to them, make me southern?

On my grandparent's small truck farm, the major crop was corn, and in
addition to feeding the corn to various animals on the farm, they would
also grind some of that golden corn into cornmeal, to make a cornbread so
good that the very dishes on the table would talk about it for a day
afterward. Every day at noon, my grandmother would come in from the field,
hang her sun bonnet on a peg, and bake cornbread for dinner, the noon
meal. As I got older and began to visit my other grandmother more often, I
saw, though I didn't think much about it, that she also made cornbread
frequently. Now that I am cast out into adulthood on my own, whenever my
brothers and I all show up at my mother's house at the same time, among
the foods she prepares is likely to be cornbread. I even bake cornbread myself at home from time to time. It isn't frequent, but I
consider it a treat when I make it. Does eating cornbread make me
southern?

Whatever particular things in my life that might be called
characteristically southern, I always felt that I was southern, or at
least from the South, which I believed would make me southern in
other people's eyes (and clearly I was thinking of southern as something
more than a geographical description). One of my most vivid memories on
this topic was a conversation with a friend from high school just after I
graduated. We were both intelligent and both felt ambitious in the vague
sort of way you can afford to be when you're young. We knew we wanted to
go somewhere and do something, and we both agreed that being southern was
a definite drawback. For us at the time, the ultimate mark of cultural
doom was the fact that we spoke with southern accents. We just had to get
rid of them country ways of talkin'. Not long afterward, when I was at
school in Ohio, my friend wrote me that we should never vote for any
politician who had a southern accent. Though my friend didn't say so
directly, I guess his idea, which I agreed with, was that a vote for a
politician who talked that awful talk was an clear vote to maintain our
feudal backwardness.

Before I tote that idea around front for y'all to get a good look at
it, I want to begin with the idea of what being southern means. The word
itself is geographical, and yet is Florida, our most southern state,
actually a southern state? There is an attitude among residents from other
southern states that Florida is OK for a fishing trip, good for a beach,
but that it's really some kind of tourist/Disneyland/orange juice-sort of state, not southern at all. If this attitude is
correct, then "southern" only appears to be a geographical term.
For that matter, is Texas southern? Aren't they too much of a
cowboy-burrito kind of culture to be a real southern state, no matter
where they are on the map? The question of being southern, then, seems to
be not a geographical but a cultural topic. Other than geography, what is
southern culture? If a man from Birmingham choreographs his own ballet and
hires dancers from the South to dance in it, is that "southern
culture"? How many people think the phrase "southern
ballet" sounds like an oxymoron? Or even without the word
"culture," phrasing this the way we normally would, is that
ballet "southern"? Obviously, it is, but is it perceived
as southern? I would guess no, or at least not as an immediate instinct.
As a cultural adjective, the term "southern" implies certain
things; chief among those implied southern characteristics is a rural
lifestyle. It has long been the case that the idea of southerness almost
obligatorily meant rural. This is apparent when people refer to a southern
accent (as southerners often do) as "country" talk; it is
apparent with the association of country music (notice the name) with
southern culture, and the fact that country music heavily plays up the
rural imagery both in lyrics and in video images. Southern as a rural idea
is also apparent in the blues, another musical form originating in the
south, when the blues, particularly older blues, emphasizes rural images
(for instance the metaphor "another mule been kickin' in my
stall"). In addition to rural associations, the word
"southern" implies traditional things derived from the early Scotch-Irish settlers and the African-Americans
who have lived in this area for the last two to three hundred years. From
those basic assumptions of southerness there follow certain things that
southerners and others who know the South expect to find here: country
music, certain types of rock music, particular foods (with some regional
variations within the South), race relations indicating a sort of
schizophrenic mix of oppression and tolerance, and a tenacious historical
memory of selected events, especially those that supposedly show the South
as a heroic victim (Civil War mythology is pretty obvious in this regard).

This question of what exactly is southern is not just something an
academic might play with. Among the million or so babble rooms on the
Internet, there is a chat group called Bubba-L, where devotees of southern
something-or-other trade opinions. To tell the truth, I suspect that the
boys working down at the auto parts store and the girls from the Saturn
plant are not on the Bubba-L chat room in the evenings, since someone on
the chat line made a joke using the Latin plurals "bubbi and bubbae,"
and that ain't very southern in my opinion. But among those who do inhabit
cyber-bubba-world, one of the topics has to do with defining southerness.
A test of southern identity from Bubba-L illustrated what I'm talking
about, declaring that you can't be a good southerner unless you (1) know
the value and meaning of a "yankee dime", (2) have barbequed a
goat, (3) have had your head checked for ticks, (4) have at least three
different pecan pie recipes. Although I fail on all counts (I never even
heard of barbequeing a goat in the South), this short test consists of knowing
some of the language, eating certain foods, and engaging in activities
associated with a rural lifestyle. In other words, this little test
embodies some of the underlying ideas of what is believed to be the basis
of southern culture. In addition to the Bubba-L chat group, the Internet
revolution has piggybacked southern culture into world-wide access in
other ways. In the new genre of e-mail joke lists, as I was preparing this
presentation, I received an email list (from someone who did not know I
was doing this) with still another test of southerness. One of the
originators of the test added the statement "One Yankee in my office
only mustered a 2 or 3, whereas the natives typically score around
20+." (I took the test and got 11 correct.) Among the questions are
references to modern entertainments: "What was the number and color
of Richard Petty's cars?"; "Where did Herschel Walker play
college football?"; and "Who was Andy Taylor's love
interest?" There was also a heapin' helpin' of questions clearly
derived from rural life: "After boiling peanuts for an hour, what
have you?"; "What is a scuppernong?"; "What do you
call the offspring of a mule?"

If we have tests of knowledge, even as jokes, to find out who is
southern, then it is clear that many people feel southerness is not
determined just by geography, and even the Encyclopedia of Southern
Culture says, "The Encyclopedia's definition of `the
South' is a cultural one" (xv). So if being southern is a cultural
idea, and if that cultural idea is very much based on rural life and on
Scotch-Irish and African-American cultures, how do southerners feel about being southern? I would suggest that the attitudes my friend
and I held after high school, which I think were really ambivalent more
than completely negative, are attitudes that are not rare for southerners.
For my friend and I the accent was the visible marker of our questionable
regional origin, and I maintain that that same concern about dialect is
alive and well even in the enlightened age we live in. An entry in the Encyclopedia
of Southern Culture says of this: "For better or for worse, the
way that southerners use the language is often noticed first by
non-southerners and draws the most comment from them" (761). I can
offer two bits of evidence for southern sensitivity to this fact. I teach
freshman writing classes in which I try to educate my students to be more
tolerant of dialect variations in the English language. I use my own
experience and dialect as illustrations, and sometimes a student from the
South will follow my lead and talk about their own background. During
those talks, I have more than once heard a student say something like
"My mama has a real bad accent." Why is the adjective
"bad" used to mean "distinctively noticeable"
describing the accent? It's that attitude that I once held myself, that
sounding like you're from the South is clearly not a good idea. It isn't
only insecure young people who feel this way. A few months ago on National
Public Radio there was a reference to a language school in Los Angeles
that helped Spanish speakers to decrease or lose their Spanish accent in
English. It was mentioned that the school would also help to get rid of
other undesireable ways of speaking, and a southern accent was
specifically mentioned. Is a southern accent the same as speaking with the accent of a foreign language? Is
the South another country from the United States? Back in the 1930s, a
northern journalist, Carl Carmer, commented on his experience in the South
by writing, "The Congo is not more different from Massachusetts or
Kansas or California" (Griffin 10). I'll also quote again from the
Bubba-L chat line. Someone wrote: "What worries me is that for the
most part there aren't pockets of expatriate southerners and southern
culture in Yankee cities and other foreign places…" Notice the word
"expatriate" and the phrase "other foreign places." If
even people from the South act as if the region is a separate country from
the rest of the United States, we lose part of our right to complain when
people from other areas take the same attitude.

I assume that people all over the United States, however, do nothave
to deal with similar pride/shame attitudes toward their own regions, that
a feeling of inferiority is not a regular part of cultural discussions
about other regions. It's a little mystifying that we carry these hangdog
expressions when the South has so many good things about it. The phrase
"southern hospitality" has long been taken as a symbol of
southern politeness and generous treatment of guests. Although serving
those same guests a good hot bowl of grits or a heavenly plate of crispy
fried okra might inspire sudden, intense politeness about what to do with
this strange food, there are other quintessentially southern foods that
evoke rapture from nearly anyone who eats them. Fried chicken the way my
grandmother made it maybe doesn't exist now, but nevertheless, even in
Maine and Hawaii they know that southern fried chicken is on the list of foods we
will get to eat in heaven. It isn't just fried chicken either, but southern
fried chicken, which first appeared in a cookbook back in 1824. Biscuits
also seem to be a typically southern dish that is highly regarded by
non-southerners, along with pecan pie. In addition to hospitality and
food, the South is known for storytelling and for music. How many artists,
or for that matter, how many musical genres, has this region given to
America and to the world? Blues, bluegrass, country, jazz, rock `n' roll.
Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys—country
music would be noticeably, audibly poorer without them. In pop music the
South has given Johnny Mercer, in R&B we have Otis Redding and Ray
Charles. And of course there's Elvis, taking black blues and white country
and helping to create a type of music so full of energy that it makes your
radio get hot just from tuning in the stations. After Elvis we have modern
southern rock, from Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers coming down off
some southern Mount Olympus, to the Atlanta Rhythym Section and the
current band Southern Culture on the Skids. While we listen to the music,
we also enjoy other entertainment activities that are common to many
southerners: football (especially college football), stock car racing, or
hunting.

Well, if you go to a southerner's house and they graciously serve you
pecan pie, put on an Allman Brothers CD, and ask you if you'd rather watch
the Georgia-Georgia Tech game, what can be bad about a place like that?
Actually, as anyone but the most narrow provincial knows, quite a few
things have been wrong with the South. Beginning well back in slavery days, the South
has had a reputation, which it deserved, for viciousness and racism toward
the blacks. It may be true that one of the greatest strongholds the Ku
Klux Klan ever had was in Indiana, it may be true that racial tensions
brought tanks onto the streets in Detroit, it may be true that racial
tensions have led to murdering strangers in New York City, but other
people's faults do not excuse our own, and it is also true that in the
1890s all across the South Jim Crow laws were passed with the unashamed,
open goal of depriving blacks of the ability to vote, and it is true that
all over the planet Earth people knew about the frenzied mob murders as
gangs of whites lynched black men, and it is true that dogs and fire hoses
were turned on southern black marchers in the 1960s. Maybe it has
not been fair to say that the South was more racist than the rest of the
country, but to say that the South was very racist was true.

Related to racism, yet different from it, and perhaps related
originally to the same rural life that is thought to mark southern
culture, there has been a southern culture of isolation, suspiciousness of
the unknown and almost a conscious desire to remain proudly ignorant.
These attitudes can be called provincialism, but we have a more colorful
term, clearly associated with the South: those people are rednecks. For
most people the term "redneck" is so obviously negative, with
such repulsive connotations, that they could just as easily ask you to
call them an idiot as a redneck. The word generally connotes strong ideas
of both ignorance and intolerance, and it is shocking, therefore, to see that some southerners gladly embrace the word
"redneck," who accept it with a sort of pride and make use of
the symbols that are thought to be a part of the redneck culture, such as
the Confederate battle flag. Perhaps for those who accept the word,
"redneck" means something like "member of a southern rural
brotherhood." Romanticizing doesn't help here, however, because there
is an ignorance and intolerance in the culture of those who call
themselves rednecks, and ignorance and intolerance are harmful traits for
any region to have, preventing that region from attaining its full human
potential. Even southerners who try to distance themselves from rednecks
and who consider the whole redneck idea embarrassing and distasteful will
also display a similar provincialism when they begin making references to
Yankees.

Thus we have in the South a mixture of very good and very bad. Almost
anywhere can say this, but at the same time, not everyone shows a
schizophrenic pride/shame attitude toward the place where they live. I
have two suggestions to make as to why I think southerners might feel
ambivalent about the South. The first is that southerners in a broad way
accept the definitions made by people from outside the South as to what is
considered good, intelligent or desirable. I realize that accepting such a
definition is not true for everyone, but I'm speaking in broad
generalities here. Unfortunately for southerners, those outside
definitions declare that some of the basic aspects of traditional southern
life are not good, intelligent or desirable. If what is good is urban life
(in contrast to rural life), many southerners may actually live in a town
or city, but culture (at least in the South, if not everywhere) invokes as
much mythology and beliefs as reality. Maybe we do live in the city, but
if we vaguely identify with rural life as part of our identity and are
then told that rural life is dirty and backward, we feel attacked. The
situation is similar with the southern dialect of English (and in fact
there are quite a few varieties of this presumed dialect). Southerners
themselves accept the general view of the U.S. population that the
standard version of English differs strongly from how southerners speak at
home, and since most people think of the standard version as
"correct," then every thing else is wrong by definition. It
isn't just a dialect, it's a defect, as far as many people from outside
the South are concerned.

As an even more negative aspect of accepting outside definitions of
what is proper and good, southerners may resent stereotypes about the
South, but they also accept those same stereotypes to some extent.
Everyone in the South probably knows someone with an even stronger accent
than their own, somebody who really sounds like they're from the
country. Southerners also tell the same stereotype jokes that
nonsoutherners tell, but we aim the jokes at another state where the
people really act southern. We're not ignorant ourselves, but in
the next state over…. If a man and woman get married in Alabama, for
instance, then move to Georgia and get divorced, are they still brother
and sister? I've also heard of a reference made by a southern colleague to
the phrase "I'm your Mississippi," an allusion to Mississippi
being at the bottom on many indicators of the quality of life. The idea
here is "no matter how bad you are, you can always know that there is someone worse."

The question naturally exists as to why southerners accept
definitions created outside the South. Why is a rural life somehow
inferior? Why is a southern accent a defective way of speaking? Of course
there are examples of people who did not or do not accept other people's
negative views of southern life, a famous example being the Vanderbilt
Agrarians, who proudly proclaimed that the rural life is a valid and
valuable alternative to modern industrialism. In spite of such examples,
many southerners do in some way accept negative views of the South, and I
cannot really answer the complicated question of why, but I believe there
has been and somewhat still is a lack of cultural confidence in the South.
Perhaps there is a kind of chicken and egg dilemma in this. Do southerners
lack confidence because we accept definitions that tell us we are
inferior, or do we accept these negative definitions because we already
lack confidence? I don't know.

I also have a second suggestion as to why southerners might feel
ambivalent about the South, and it does not involve false negative views
imposed from outside. It is also possible that southerners recognize that
there actually are serious problems in southern culture and history. Maybe
we do know that racism is degrading even to the racist, maybe we do know
that lack of education is shameful and stupid, maybe we do know that the
serf-like poverty of southern history, both black and white, makes us look
like a crude, feudal society. As a region, however, we have not had the
cultural confidence (so again I come back to this idea of lacking
confidence) to acknowledge our own negatives openly and combat them. Instead of saying
"Yes, we have our faults and we're working on them," instead of
saying "Yes, our history contains grim episodes that we aren't proud
of," instead we mutter about damned Yankees, hang our heads and slink
off to schools to lose our southern accents.

If southerners want to be fully proud to be from a region that can, by
God, stand proud before the world with the music we've given to the human
race, we have to accept who we are without excuses. We face here a problem
that all people at some point in their history face, of being culturally
honest. The Germans after World War II had to face this problem and have
been generally honest about it. The American South has not followed the
German model, however. Instead we have taken the approach of the Japanese,
making excuses and pretending not to know all of the evils committed in
our own history. You cannot honestly acknowledge only part of a culture
and a history. If you want to tell the world that you are an Englishman,
then abusing the Irish is yours just as much as Shakespeare is yours, and
you must take both. To be an honest southerner we cannot claim only the
antebellum mansions, but we must take the slave shacks with them. We
cannot claim only the shining malls and skyscrapers that sit in our modern
southern cities, but we must take the hotels and restaurants of decades
past that would not serve blacks. If I want to claim to be a southerner,
then I have a moral obligation to accept all of the South, and not to lie
about the nobility of fighting for states' rights when I discuss a war
fought over slavery, not to lie about how the Confederate battle flag got onto
the Georgia state flag. Slavery is my history. Anti-labor laws are my
history. Cotton mills holding their workers by the throat is my history.
This is my culture. And so is watermelon on summer evenings my culture,
and Greg Allman is mine, and fried chicken is mine, with biscuits and
gravy. Southerners must take all of it, and we must look with open eyes at
both the good and the bad. Then perhaps more of us will have the cultural
confidence to say to the rest of the country, "Y'all might could at
least try these grits."

Works Cited

Griffin, Larry J. "Why Was the South a Problem to America?" in The South
as an American Problem. Eds. Larry J. Griffin and Don H. Doyle. Athens,
GA: U of Georgia P, 1995: 10-32.